Jihi:
Huh, you know you’re right. If I recall though the idea was that you couldn’t gain enough karma through normal playing to excel in everything though. You had to pick and choose specialties or else you wound up sucking at everything by the time you reached the endgame. Of course cyberware could make up for a lot of that but if you chose a shaman you wanted to stay away from augmentations anyway. There was a stat, it was called ‘spirit’ or something like that, that directly affected how powerful your magic was. It started out maxed but would gradually diminish as you shoved more technology in your body. And it affected spells used against you to. A magic fireball would do less damage but healing spells wouldn’t heal you as much either.
Essence, I believe. You could actually gain experience (karma) to an unlimited degree. It was better to specialize, but you could basically keep going until you earned so much as to max out everything.